99obw

One thing I can add is that when Pulloff and I searched locally for an EJ22 for his '99, the only engine we found with EGR was from an auto tranny car. The engine he purchased from a '95 manual tranny car didn't have EGR, and unfortunately the guy at the junkyard was a complete jerk about us returning it. He picked up the phone and called some "subaru expert" to confirm that the "swap is impossible". I talked Pulloff out of a CCR engine for his car. I'm sure they are good engines, I just thought it was silly to put an expensive engine in a car with almost 190k miles on it. I think he ended up putting just over $1k into the replacement project, but we did all seals, water pump, timing belt, belts, new wires, plugs, head gaskets, head bolts, new coil, thermostat, etc. The junkyard people around here are a__holes, they removed the throttle body and coil off of the engine we ended up using. I think the engine cost around $500, and had around 80k miles on it. With the work we did it should be good for the life of the car and then some.

That seems so obvious now!! I have been putting the dielectric grease in the center of the wire where the plug goes, but what was sticking in my case was the outside of the black plastic piece that sticks into the head. It was ferociously stuck. I just stuck an old set of wires on there temporarily until I buy new wires, I'll try the dielectric on the outside next time.

Measure twice, cut once.

I don't know of any procedure to ease the removal of the plug wires. I destroyed a set of wires a few months ago when changing the plugs. You might try warming the engine up and carefully trying to remove the wires, but be sure to let the engine cool down before attempting to remove the plugs. I ended up removing the valve covers in order to get the broken pieces of plug wires out of the holes in the heads. The plugs are much easier to remove with the valve covers removed. I wonder what sort of lubricant could be put on the plug wires to ease their removal next time? Anti-seize, silicone, oil, grease??? Be sure to put a little anti-seize on the threads of the new plugs.

I did it with the motor in the car. I think it's probably easier to remove the engine altogether, but if you don't have a lift doing it in the car isn't too bad. Make sure you get the 11044AA610 gaskets, they are the newest AFAIK.

A pint of homebrew sitting on a car in one's garage is a beautiful thing! You have a keg refrigerator in your shop!?!?!?!? I usually imbibe black and tans when working in my shop.

Go to http://www.libertysubaru.com and search their online parts catalog. It appears that 12305AA242 fits both cars.

That's not always true. Valves with too much lash generally don't get burnt. My observation has been that exhaust valves in this engine burn due to too little lash. For this to happen only requres more valve seat wear than lifter/cam wear. Things get to a point when the valve in question isn't fully closing, then heat isn't transferred properly from the valve to the head, and the valve overheats and fails.

No. 1995 EJ22 from an auto tranny car is the only engine I know of that swaps relatively easily.

The valve was probably burnt due to lack of periodic adjustment.

Viscosity index improver. These are polymeric additives that thicken oil when it's hot, improving the viscosity index or the ability of the oil to resist viscosity change over temperature. Synthetic base stocks have a higher inherent viscosity index and therefore require less or no VII's. VII's break down with severe heat and form sludge and deposits.

Josh, as always your attention to detail leaves me in awe. It makes me wish I had the time to do more than a half-baked job of everything. Good oil advice Blitz. It looks as if the rings were pretty well carboned up, resulting in the scuffing. I would run a good 5w-40 in this one. M1 T&SUV or Rotella T. Those are both HDEO's that are made for turbo applications. The turbo heat was probably cooking the oil that the PO was using. The multiviscosity oils I know of without VII's are full synthetic 10w-30 and possibly 15w-40. Even though the 5w-40 HDEO's contain some VII they should work well.

I found the following technique helpful when trying to create head gasket related bubbling in the overflow: Drive the car until it's fully warmed up, then beat the snot out of it for about 5 miles to get it as warm as possible. Immediately open the hood and look in the overflow, hold the throttle open to rev the engine to about 2500 revs. If you see bubbles the gaskets are likely blown.

I would start by checking the connector and the ground of the sensor. The rear O2 sensor is a three wire, meaning the signal ground is through the exhaust, so a rusty exhaust could be throwing off the readings. You might try clamping a temporary ground wire to the body of the sensor with a hose clamp and running it to a good ground. You might also ohm out the harness between the rear sensor and the ECU. If that doesn't work I would next replace the rear sensor again.

Pinging is hard on rod bearings among other things. Pinging should be the exception rather than the rule. Run what the owner's manual says and do CC cleanings to reduce pinging as needed.

Are you sure it was the rear sensor? Rear sensor replacement is fairly rare and would probably be done as a result of this code or a similar one being found. Hard to say if it would fail by now. It's not impossible.

Poor to fair, that sounds about right.

The ECU compares the readings from the O2 sensors before and after the cat to verify that it's working.

You might want to replace the rear O2 sensor first and see if the code goes away rather than starting with the cat.

http://www.1stsubaruparts.com will be one of the least expensive places to get the part, that's where I got it. A bad ground is a possibility, but the bad ground would likely be on the speedo head somewhere as replacing it seems to cure it 100%. Perhaps something in the original design or construction made it reset when the washer pump either raised the ground (ground bounce) or lowered the +12V (supply droop) due to the current transient when the motor started. Intermittent symptoms are by far the hardest to find the cause of. I'm not aware of a source for just the board, though you might be able to swap a used head from another year, I don't know for sure. I'm an electrical engineer, and I guess I was just too lazy to take a look at it. I have little interest in debugging a board I don't have a schematic for, and after designing and debugging all day long I'm short on patience for electronics when I get home. Swapping a new head is certainly an easily solution, though possibly not the least expensive approach. Best of luck. Keep us posted if you find anything.

I just paid about $55 each at Advance Auto for rebuilt calipers for the rear on a '99. With the rust I felt it wasn't worth my time to try to rebuild them. Very happy with the results.

I think I can answer two of your questions. I have read that the answer to this is yes. The metallic detergents in diesel oils can harm the cat if the engine burns a lot of oil. That hasn't stopped me from using it in the Subaru which burns a lot of oil, as the cats are about to fall off of the car from rust and I don't really care if I kill them. If your car doesn't burn much oil it shouldn't be an issue. With that said I should say that my diesel Jetta has a cat on it. Don't know what that means, but it has one, so I don't think the designers of the car were worried about it being damaged. It doesn't burn any oil, leaks it like crazy instead. More energy is required to pump a thicker oil around an engine. That energy winds up heating a thicker oil to a higher temperature than a thinner oil would run. Depending on the engine and cooling system that might make the engine run hotter. I am running diesel oil, using Mobil 1 T&SUV 5w-40 (Delvac 1) in both gassers right now. No problems. I think it's interesting that a reputable company like Mobil is marketing a diesel oil with little to no modifications for gassers with cats. Some time in the next couple of months I will be posting the used oil analysis from my Jeep with the T&SUV in it, should be around 12k miles. I will post a link to the thread here on the USMB.

This is my understanding based on my engineering background and car experience, FWIW. When a material has been stressed so much that it won't return to its original dimensions, it's said to have yielded. Torque-to-yield bolts are used because the stress required to cause a given material to yield is known. If the bolts are stressed beyond the threshold of plastic deformation the resulting clamping force is consistant based on the yield strength of the material. http://www.key-to-steel.com/Articles/Art43.htm

Fram filters actually filter pretty well, but the construction and reliability is very poor. They are famous for causing startup noise due to all of the oil draining out of them. Mobil 1 (using one on the Jeep) Purolator (in the queue for the Jeep) Napa Gold (Wix) (in the queue for the Jetta) Hastings (using one on the Jetta) Baldwin Amsoil (using one on the Subaru, made by Hastings) These are my favorites for value and performance, but certainly there are some other good ones out there.

FWIW, I reused the bolts on our EJ25 and it's gone over 60k miles since then. With that said I am pretty sure they are torque-to-yield(kicking myself), and I don't recommend reusing them. The new bolts we put on Pulloff's EJ22 had the heads painted, and painted heads is a signal that the bolts shouldn't be reused. I don't remember if the bolt heads on the EJ25 were painted. Traditionally head bolt heads were painted when they were retorqued the first time, so if a person tears into an engine and the head bolts are painted they shouldn't be reused.